Artwork Appreciation
Artist Daniel Showgin Lee’s Deformation contains many images of plants and animals that retain his consistently realistic style, but they are set almost randomly against a grid-like background made up of bright red, green, blue, and yellow rectangles, which produces a kind of tension. This work was created in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Lee was deeply affected by the fearful atmosphere at that time. The disruption of usual life actually spurred his innovative ability, and he incorporated this anxiety into his works. Attempting to break the logic of his past works, he freely arranged the realistic images of black bears, beluga whales, a line of dancing pigs in dance costumes, and so on against the colorful background. He combined 15 digital images into a large-scale work that not only reflects the out-of-control, chaotic nature of the pandemic era, but also expresses the kind of “deformation” referred to in the title.